Photograph by: Handout photos
, Vancouver Sun

This will no doubt come as good news to all non-gardeners out there: Weeds are becoming fashionable - even de rigueur in some circles - as attractive ornamental plants.

Yes, the days of despising the dandelion and doing battle with the buttercup are coming to a close.

Both these plants, once regarded as wicked weeds, are now being embraced as natural, beautiful, acceptable flowering ornamentals in both public and private landscapes.

And this new love affair with weeds doesn't end there. Morning glory has started to be seen as lovely flowering vine producing pristine white flowers.

Its more vigorous, invasive, unruly ways as an irrepressible weed seem to have been forgotten, or perhaps consciously ignored.

Look around and you will see evidence of this rise of the new weed culture everywhere.

Dandelions and buttercup proliferate in many public green spaces, school yards, boulevards and front yards along with common oxeye field daisies.

Morning glory, in some places, is being allowed to smother hedges to form a solid wall of white flowers.

Lanky Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera), a relative of busy lizzie, is frequently grown as a handsome shadetolerant garden ornamental because of its pretty pink flowers, despite being a seriously invasive plant that can colonize riverbanks and unprotected green spaces.

And the common yellow flag iris, a plant on the top 10 list of most invasive weeds, is being grown in many home gardens as a pretty aquatic plant.

Even some serious and respected gardeners are giving once-hated weeds places of honour in their planting schemes.

Helen Dillon, for example, Ireland's most famous gardener and an internationally well-known plant guru, has never shied away from making liberal use of the freeseeding purple-flowering weed Hesperis matronalis, also known as dame's or sweet rocket, throughout her celebrated garden in Dublin.

Top British garden designer and multiple gold-medal Chelsea Flower Show winner Andy Sturgeon also sees nothing wrong with using dame's rocket to create gentle rhythms of purple flowers throughout his award-winning gardens.

Similarly, esteemed gardener Fergus Garrett happily allows cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris), the common white-flowering hedge row weed, to spread everywhere at Christopher Lloyd's famous Great Dixter garden in Kent, while at neighbouring Sissinghurst, the garden made famous by Vita Sackville West, buttercup and cow parsley are tolerated, even encouraged, as prominent plants in wild grassy orchard areas.

Part of the reason for this change in attitude to certain weeds has to do with the rise in popularity of naturalistic meadow gardens, where common hardy orchids, such as Dactylorhiza fuchsii, Orchis mascula and Listera ovata, are being introduced and encouraged along with buttercup, field daisies, camas, cow parsley and field daisies.

There has also been a sea change towards the use of herbicides to control weeds.

Many gardeners, as well as municipalities, are no longer willing or permitted to spray weed-killing herbicides and they have neither the labour force nor the budget to go out and spend hours eradicating weeds by hand.

In Burnaby, dandelion and buttercup is well established in areas around Deer Lake where skunk cabbage, once regarded as an odorous offender, is now appreciated as a beautiful, seasonal, naturalizing bog plant rather than a weedy invasive plant with an unpleasant scent.

In Vancouver, Sophie Dessureault, integrated pest management controller with the park board, says morning glory is one weed that appears to have definitely changed its image from being a twisted-and-entangling nuisance weed to a "fairly attractive" fast-growing vine.

Morning glory is still the bane of my gardening existence, choking the life out of or toppling many treasured plants, but others see it differently and are happy to use morning glory to cover fences and intersperse in hedges. These are probably the same homeowners who think buttercups and dandelions are natural beauties, deserving of a place in boulevards and front lawns.

The definition of a weed has not changed. It is still "a plant in the wrong place," but what has changed is the perception of whether a weed is dangerous or unacceptably damaging to the environment and neighbouring species.

Giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) is still listed as a harmful, noxious weed, capable of burning the unsuspecting with its sap.

Purple loosestrife, yellow flag iris, Himalayan blackberry and Japanese knotweed are all on the hit list of the most invasive weeds in B.C.

These are among the most difficult weeds to eradicate, along with more common nuisance weeds such as horsetail. Even deep burying does not eradicate these weeds, which soon surface despite all efforts and immediately begin their mission to take over the world.

In Europe, ivy is still widely grown as a popular ground cover and wallcovering plant, although here in B.C. it has long been recognized as a take-no-prisoners invader that is no longer acceptable to plant in your garden, although many people still do.

Ivy quickly colonizes when it escapes into the wild, scrambling over trees and making branches heavy and unsafe and smothering smaller shrubs.

This is why crews of "ivy busters" can often be found in prominent public green spaces such as Stanley Park, tearing up the weed in a desperate bid to give other species a chance to thrive.

English holly has also been named an "outlaw plant" because of its propensity to freely seed. Gardeners are also being discouraged by such groups as the Invasive Plant Council of B.C. from using ornamental plants that are potential invaders, such as broom, buddleia periwinkle and dead nettle.

Many popular garden plants, such as bluebells, lady's mantel, oxalis, variegated goutweed, yellow poppies, brunnera and yellow corydalis, are regarded as weedy by avid gardeners.

My attitude to dandelions changed a little when my granddaughter, Maya, repeatedly stopped to admire the flowers and insisted on picking a bouquet of them for her mom.

Perhaps we do need to rethink some of our criticism of some weeds, but I, for one, will not give morning glory the time of day: It will be cut and dumped every time in my garden. And I cannot see myself ever willingly allowing dandelions to rule the garden world.

Look around and you will see evidence of this rise of the new weed culture everywhere.

One of the prettiest trees for a small or medium-sized garden, the Korean or Japanese dogwood (Cornus kousa), can be seen in flower all over the Lower Mainland at the moment.

Flowering about a month later than the native dogwood, (Cornus nuttalli), the kousa dogwood produces very similar cross-shaped white flowers. It is a deciduous tree, a little smaller than the common dogwood, growing to about 25 feet (7.6 m) high by 15 feet (4.6 m) wide.

The Chinese dogwood, (C. kousa var. chinensis), is similar but is a little more floriferous.

There is a beautiful pink cultivar called 'Satomi' that is also very popular with gardeners. All kousa dogwoods thrive in full sun to part shade and like acidic, well-drained soil.

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